Black Coaches in N.B.A. Have Shorter Tenures

The men coaching N.B.A. teams in recent seasons have looked like no other group of head coaches in the history of major American professional sports. Today, 10 of the league's 30 coaches are black, ranging from young former players like Terry Porter in Milwaukee to veterans of multiple coaching jobs like Bernie Bickerstaff in Charlotte.

At a time when the National Football League can count only 10 black head coaches in its history, the National Basketball Association has reached a position rare for any business: when a black coach or executive is hired or fired, almost nobody mentions race. Opportunity in the N.B.A. appears to have become color blind.

But the coaches who have received those opportunities have not had much time to enjoy them. In a pattern that has gone largely unnoticed, except among black coaches themselves, white coaches have been holding on to their jobs for significantly longer than black coaches. Yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers fired Paul Silas, who was in his second season with the team.

Over the last decade, black N.B.A. coaches have lasted an average of just 1.6 seasons, compared with 2.4 seasons for white coaches, according to a review of coaching records by The New York Times. That means the typical white coach lasts almost 50 percent longer and has most of an extra season to prove himself.

This month alone, three of the six black coaches who had held their jobs for more than a season have been fired, including Silas, who had eight years of N.B.A coaching experience before joining Cleveland. The Orlando Magic dismissed Johnny Davis last Thursday after less than two seasons. On March 2, the Portland Trail Blazers fired Maurice Cheeks, then the black coach with the second-longest tenure; he had lasted almost four seasons.

"Our white counterparts are given more the benefit of the doubt," Silas said in an interview in January. "Things have changed dramatically in our society, but it still has a long way to go."

The gap has created a deep division among coaches and executives, one that splits largely but not exclusively along racial lines. Some, including Commissioner David Stern, said the numbers surprised them and called them largely a coincidence. Doc Rivers, the coach of the Boston Celtics, who is black, said he thought that owners and general managers now gave white and black coaches equal chances to succeed.

The league, some people said, is simply too competitive for race to affect executives.

"I believe that right now each coaching decision is based on a fierce determination made by the owner and general manager that they want to win -- and that that decision has become color blind," Stern said. He called the league "the best example of equal-opportunity employment, even if against the judgment of perfection it isn't there yet."

The contrast in tenures might be most easily seen among coaches with the greatest longevity. Of the 14 N.B.A. coaches who have held jobs for at least five seasons since 1989, only one has been black -- Lenny Wilkens, in Atlanta, from 1993 to 2000 -- despite the fact that teams began to hire black coaches in large numbers in the late 1980's. The three active N.B.A. coaches with the longest tenure are all white, and they have been in place for about a decade on average.

The pattern holds in almost any important category of coaches. Winning black coaches have been replaced sooner than winning white coaches on average, and experienced black coaches have served shorter tenures than experienced white coaches. The same is true among losing coaches, among rookie coaches and among coaches who played in the N.B.A. and those who did not.

Minding the Tenure Gap

Black N.B.A. coaches and executives said they were proud that the league was one of just a handful of organizations to have turned over a large share of leadership jobs to minorities. They added that the situation was continuing to improve. But they also said they had long noticed the difference in coaching tenures, despite the lack of attention it has received and the speed with which many of those same coaches found new jobs.

"Does race have anything to do with this? Now I'm sure the people who do the hiring say no," said Al Attles, an assistant general manager of the Golden State Warriors, who in 1969 became the third black coach in N.B.A. history and later won a championship. "But it surely has to be something more than wins and losses. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, eventually you have to say it's a duck."

Even if the cause was rarely conscious racism, coaches said, age-old athletic stereotypes -- the black athlete as a prodigal talent and white athlete as hard-working gym rat -- can make blacks seem particularly unsuited to be good teachers. Some black coaches said they thought that team owners and general managers, a largely white group, were probably most at ease with people similar to them, just as most people were.

And players, both black and white, are still far more accustomed to seeing whites in positions of authority than blacks, coaches said. Some black coaches, including Cheeks in Portland and Byron Scott with the Nets, lost their jobs after clashing with a black player.

With any individual coaching change, the effect of race is almost impossible to perceive and may in fact be wholly absent. Black coaches were hesitant to point to specific examples.

Silas, for example, seemed to lose control of his team recently, and the Cavaliers fined him $10,000 last week after he made a vulgar reference to a former member of the team. In New Jersey last season, Scott was fired after two straight trips to the N.B.A. finals, when the Nets were struggling to live up to expectations and some players seemed to have lost respect for him.

"It's so subjective," Silas said earlier this season, referring to the effect that a coach's race has in any specific situation.

The N.B.A. coach with the longest tenure today is Jerry Sloan, who is white and is in his 17th season as coach of the Utah Jazz. The calculations of average tenures by The Times included only coaches whose tenures had ended. But when Sloan and other active coaches were included, the gap between white and black coaches was nearly identical.

To many white executives, the lack of a clear connection between race and individual firings makes the pattern seem all the more likely to be a coincidence.

"My general feeling is that it's a performance league, and there is equality in it in that sense," said Donnie Walsh, the chief executive of the Indiana Pacers. "If you do well, you're going to move on to a better job or another job. Those that aren't performing are going to get fired."

But researchers -- whether they study sports or the job market -- said the pattern in the N.B.A. matched that of many businesses. Across the economy, black workers have shorter job tenures on average than white workers. Some of the difference reflects the jobs blacks hold and the experience they bring. But some of the gap has no clear explanation.

"For black coaches, you have to be a Jesus miracle worker," said Butch Beard, who was fired after two disappointing years with the Nets in the mid-1990's and is now the head coach at Morgan State. "With a bad team, ownership wants you to do more than what the team is capable of doing. If you don't pull it off right away, they think it is the coach's fault."

Beard added: "This won't get me another job, but that's the truth. It's very disturbing to me."

A number of other coaches, current and former, declined to comment. Agents and team spokesmen said that coaches had little to gain by discussing a controversial topic that made some team executives uncomfortable.

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It was almost 40 years ago when Bill Russell succeeded Red Auerbach as the Celtics' coach, becoming the first black man to run a major league sports team since Fritz Pollard coached in the N.F.L. in the 1920's. The integration of the N.B.A. coaching ranks began to take off in the 1980's, when Stern and other league officials pushed teams to hire a diverse group of assistant coaches.

More recently, the league offered financial incentives for teams in its developmental league to hire former N.B.A. players, most of whom are black, as coaches. A coaching pipeline has been created. The N.B.A. also offers more opportunities today than it once did, because team executives have become less patient and tend to fire coaches more quickly than in the past.

Since Russell, the league has had dozens of black head coaches, and every one of the 30 N.B.A. franchises has had a black coach at some point.

"David Stern has made a conscious effort at building relationships" between team executives and former players, said Rivers, the Celtics' coach. "When you're comfortable with each other, it makes it easier to hire each other."

In the N.F.L., where a majority of players are also black, 3 of the 10 black men who became head coaches have been hired since 2002, when two outside lawyers and an economist released a report showing that black coaches had a better won-loss record, on average, when fired than white coaches did. The league later instituted a rule requiring teams looking for a head coach to interview at least one minority candidate or face a fine.

But if Russell represents the N.B.A.'s pioneering role in hiring, he is also a symbol of frustration to many black coaches and executives, and his experiences still echo with many of them. Critics called him lazy and aloof. Russell has said, "A lot of it was pure racism."

Some of the whispers have not changed. Newspapers reported a few years ago that Silas, who was fired in 2003 after going 47-35 as the Hornets' coach, was angry that a white coach on another team had spread rumors that Silas was lazy.

"I've known a lot of white coaches who didn't work hard at all," Silas said in January. "But the perception was that they did."

The stereotypes seem to spring from timeworn caricatures of athletes, which hold that whites work hard to make the most of limited skills while blacks are simply gifted, coaches said. Rivers said he could often tell whether a player described in a scouting report was white or black simply by looking at the adjectives.

The images extend beyond basketball. When Sports Illustrated surveyed major league baseball players recently and asked them to name a peer who got the best results from the least talent, the top five vote getters were white. Five of the six players said to be getting the least from the most talent were black.

"What really upsets me are the comments that came after the firing of Isiah Thomas and Byron Scott, that these guys were not organized enough, not committed enough," said Bill Walton, the Hall of Fame player and ABC announcer, who is white. "This whole sense that these guys are not working at their craft is ridiculous."

Thomas, now the Knicks' president, was fired by the Pacers in 2002-3 after the team had gone 48-34.

The stereotype has not prevented black coaches from being hired, but it might well seep into the minds of fans, players and ultimately the general manager when a team starts to struggle, coaches said. A losing record combined with faint doubts about a coach's work ethic or leadership ability can lead to a quick pink slip, they said.

"You still fight the myths and stereotypes," said Wayne Embry, a senior adviser to the Toronto Raptors, who in 1971, with the Bucks, became the first black general manager in a major sports league. "I hate even talking about all these things, but that's where it is."

Lawrence F. Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, said that past discrimination could be contributing to the difference in coaching tenures. With more opportunities to coach in the past, white coaches could bring better résumés to a job vacancy and might be able to negotiate longer, richer contracts, making owners less willing to fire them.

"You would think that would erode over time," Katz said. "But 'over time' can take a real long time."

Both black and white executives said they had no doubt that the situation had improved, though, and the records bear them out. Over the last decade, blacks have been hired to coach good teams just as often as whites have, based on teams' records in the season or partial season before a new coach took over. In the 1980's and the early 1990's, white coaches got significantly better jobs by this measure.

"I think it's something that will continue to get better," said Billy King, the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, who is black. "Some of our better white coaches are getting up in age. It's going to be a new generation of coaches coming in."

How the Study Was Conducted

To determine whether there were differences in the tenures of white and black coaches in the National Basketball Association, The New York Times examined all coaching tenures in the N.B.A. since 1989. Other factors that could be related to a decision to dismiss a coach were also examined.

The calculations were based on 159 coaching tenures, involving 110 different coaches, who either left their positions voluntarily or were dismissed. Only completed tenures were used in the calculations. Those currently coaching were not included, because some were hired very recently and that could skew the results. Any tenure that lasted fewer than 10 games was also excluded.

Team performance turned out to be the most important factor in a coach's job security; winning games and making the playoffs strongly correlated with longer coach tenures. The quality of the team before the coach took it over was also a factor. But white coaches tended to keep their jobs longer than black coaches even when those factors were taken into account.

PRO BASKETBALL Correction: March 23, 2005, Wednesday A chart in the sports pages yesterday of the longest-tenured coaches hired in the National Basketball Association in the last 15 years, with an article about the comparatively shorter tenures of black coaches, misstated the period that Jeff Van Gundy was head coach of the New York Knicks. It was March 1996 to December 2001, not 1995 to 2002.